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A Connecticut company says it is zeroing in on what caused a 20-foot rocket to go awry shortly after launch from New Mexico's Spaceport America.

UP Aerospace officials have not yet discovered what caused its unmanned SpaceLoft XL rocket to wobble and go off-course seconds after takeoff Sept. 25. It was the first rocket launched from the state's fledgling spaceport near Upham.

But the problem will push back the previously announced Oct. 21 launch date for the company's second rocket, said Chief Executive Officer Eric Knight in a telephone call from company headquarters in Farmington, Conn.

The rocket crashed in the remote southern New Mexico desert after reaching about 40,000 feet, well short of UP Aerospace's goal of sending it about 70 miles above the earth.

UP Aerospace - helped with radar data from the intended landing site, nearby White Sands Missile Range - located the rocket several days later.

It's taking time to figure out what went wrong because all of the rocket's key systems had operated as expected and the company has not been able to find anything major, Jerry Larson, company president, said in a news release.

An analysis and radar data show the rocket was traveling on a perfect trajectory toward space, Larson said.

"The subtlety of the anomaly is what is making the analysis a little more time-consuming," he said.

However, company officials expect to home in on the cause shortly, then they will begin preparing for more flights, he said.

Knight said the launch schedule will be determined by the cause of the anomaly and the time it takes to fix it.

"We're hopeful that we're talking about days (to find the problem)," he said.

The company's next two rockets, the SL-2 and SL-3, are built and ready to go, Larson said. UP Aerospace plans another launch before the end of the year and eventually hopes to launch as many as two rockets a month from the spaceport.

"We have a very full launch calendar for this year and through 2007, 2008 and beyond," Larson said. "We just want to make sure everything is 100 percent perfect before proceeding."

UP Aerospace officials have said they would make every effort to put the SpaceLoft XL's payload on the next flight if backers of the experiments are interested. The rocket carried various scientific experiments, including some from students.

The SpaceLoft XL is capable of launching up to 110 pounds of scientific, educational and entrepreneurial payloads to an altitude as high as 140 miles.

Despite not reaching space, Knight has called the initial launch successful because it was the first at Spaceport America, currently a temporary concrete launch pad with some small temporary buildings in the desert between Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences, about 95 miles north of El Paso.

The site is the proposed home of a $225 million spaceport where Richard Branson, the British billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, has announced plans to headquarter a space tourism company.